When you typically think of luxury car features, do you envision rich leather seating and extravagant trim? Advanced cruise control and intelligent self-parking? Whatever you’re imagining, I’m betting “dim my headlights so I don’t blind other people” isn’t it.
But not only has BMW used its “High Beam Assistant” as an upsell for well over a decade, it’s also charging drivers extra to unlock the safety feature that’s already built into their cars — by buying it as an over-the-air software update.
Apparently, this has been going on for nearly two years, but Car Magazine editor Jake Groves brought it to my attention for the first time this week in this viral tweet:
Let’s forget the price for a moment, because that’s not what infuriates me. (In the grand scheme of things, £160 isn’t a huge amount for your average BMW buyer to spend.) It’s that the rest of us are depending on BMW drivers being such good citizens that they’ll spend their own money to avoid showing off the power of their blazing headlights, all because a car company locked a perfectly good public safety feature behind a digital paywall.
Let's hope this doesn't come stateside
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